With hunger spiking around the world, food banks are mobilizing to meet the need. But getting enough supplies during lockdowns isn’t an easy task.
Take the case of the European Food Banks Federation, known as FEBA. With economies sinking, the group and its members have seen a 50% jump in food demand from charities, on average.
The group was offered leftover ingredients by a major fast-food restaurant. Under lockdown conditions, though, it was nearly impossible to visit the chain’s thousands of locations to collect the supplies. Meanwhile, FEBA has also seen a shortage of volunteers.
Before the pandemic, a large percentage of those donating their time were older than 65, and now many of those volunteers can’t be part of the group’s work because of the Covid-19 risk.
“It’s a really challenging process,” said Angela Frigo, secretary general at FEBA. “Even if there is this increase of food, which is recovered and redistributed, it’s not enough because the requests from charities and also the most deprived is increasing day by day.”
It’s a similar story in the U.S.
Second Harvest Heartland, which oversees programs in 59 counties in Minnesota and western Wisconsin, had just added a new facility outside of Minneapolis at the end of March. The new building has almost triple the warehouse space of the old one and wasn’t supposed to run out of storage room for 10 years.
With the pandemic, the warehouse filled up in just months.
A couple dozen trucks arrive per day, bringing in 300,000 pounds of food, compared with 150,000 on average last year.
“This is a totally different kind of operation from a volume perspective compared to what we used to do,” said Omar Jarrar, the director of operations at Second Harvest Heartland.
Globally, as many as 132 million more people than previously projected could go hungry in 2020. Many of the visitors to distribution centers in the U.S. and Europe have never needed food assistance before. With millions out of work, budgets are stretched and food is increasingly difficult to afford.
“One thing that we have to realize is that they’re not only just trying to feed their families — they’re also trying to house their families, to keep up with their bills,” said LaPorchia Collins, an applied economist and professor at Tulane University. “They’re trying to manage all of these different things and we only have so much money to do so. So the safety net is really, really, really important.”
—Joel Leon in London and Catarina Saraiva in Houston
Food inequalities are exacerbated along racial lines. In the U.S., Black Americans are two-and-a half times as likely as their White counterparts to have low or very low access to enough food for an active and healthy life. For Latino Americans, the rate is double that of White people. The global hunger crisis will also disproportionately impact women, who are 10% more likely to be food insecure than men.